Just thinking out loud... Spent a lot of money on cameras, the best film, really great paper & chemicals, then hours washing prints, so that nothing bad happens to them years from now.... Then have some guy come out of nowhere and mess about them with photoshop... cuts out what you thought was the main subject.... then put his name on them.....
Does this sound OK to you?
Bill
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"Nobody is perfect! But even among those that are perfect, some are more perfect than others." Walt Sewell 1947
I think it has some merit. However the images are much more thought provoking if you know the background, and it doesn't appear that you can get all of the information you need from the images themselves. You can't walk up to the picture and know what it is about without more info. Maybe seeing the old and the new together would make sense.
Geeno
I think they should be seen alongside accredited versions of the original , after all it is a tribute to the original author and that's a long standing artistic tradition. A note on the background is also IMHO an essential addition.
The poignancy of a 'lost' family from Nazi Germany is incredibly powerful and the subtext of how modern technology gives us even greater power to eliminate others in an increasingly virtual world should also not be lost.
Hope that doesn't sound too pretentiouss.
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Hmm- Wonder if she'd notice if I bought that :)
A real comment by a close relation "Yes I know Mom and Dad have a camera but it's NOT DIGITAL so they need a new one ". Film is NEVER going to be the average person's medium of choice again .
I think it has some merit. However the images are much more thought provoking if you know the background, and it doesn't appear that you can get all of the information you need from the images themselves.
I don't know. You can see the fact that a composition that "should" be around a person is missing its person; you don't know exactly what's missing, but maybe that's part of the point.
I think it's an interesting project. I wouldn't call it a *photographic* project exactly---it just uses photographs as its raw material.
Someone---maybe Mondrian, before his famous abstractions?---did a number of paintings like this, where an obvious, conventional composition was missing its central element. They're very disconcerting to look at, and I get something of the same effect from the Somoroff picture. (And from the Garfield strip.)
-NT
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Garfield without Garfield... that warm sensation running down my legs, god, I didn't... Bjorke you kill me!
Don't know -- this takes "Photoshopping out" to a new level of obsession. All too easy to generate art-crit
blather about Nazis making people disappear and bringing the context out as the subject. To me it's an idea
in development, a sketchbook/notebook thing, that might or might not go somewhere. Needs work. A lot of "art photography"
is like this -- not there yet, why is it on the wall?
I find it a little disturbing. I'm not knocking it mind you, that's just my gut reaction. I'll have to ponder why.
What bothers me about it is that without an explanation, future generations might not understand what/why this alteration was done and think that is how they were originally made.
A lot of "art photography"
is like this -- not there yet, why is it on the wall?
I see it as art .. not art photography. Just because some uses PhotoShop does not make the end result photography.
How are we going to see it, judge it, get moved by it, enjoy it, if it does not get on the walls? How well it affects people will be part of the process of determining if it stays on the walls.
Vaughn
Bill...in this case it sounds okay to me. The next person to try it probably will seem a bit trite.
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At least with LF landscape, a bad day of photography can be a good day of exercise.
My first reaction to the article was very strong (but it was at 6:00 am...). I found it to be rather outrageous plagiarism and the fact that the original artwork was altered by removing the very thing that is the central theme seemed pathetic. Having calmed down and read the responses, however, I am beginning to think maybe that is the most interesting aspect of this work: to remove from the photographs what was the ultimate purpose of taking them. On the other hand I can't help thinking: what would August Sander have to say about this?
I am paging through my "Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts" as I type and I would find it a lot more interesting to remove the sitters from their environments and have them float in white space or something of that sort. If I remove the people in my mind, the images seem fuzzy, empty and boring to me.
A note on the "lost families from Germany": Sander created a body of work that spanned nearly the entire population of Germany between ca. 1892-1952 (btw, this interval spans the old German Empire, the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany and the early Federal Republic), including farmers, brick layers, coal miners, engineers, inventors, industials, bankers, politicians and artists. The majority of the images were made before 1933, so I do not see any connection in this regard, at least not from the perspective of Sander. The Nazis confiscated and destroyed any from of art that was considered contractory to their doctrines. I am not sure what the author implies by stating: "Maybe the subjects are absent because of the Nazi curse". The people that Sander photographed were not among those that were "lost" but a portion of the sitters may have been involved.
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